shibu

If you're looking for a definition of art then you must look inside your own beliefs, in my view. Art means different things to different people. I, for instance, can't get at all excited about a painting by Jackson Pollock, or Caravaggio, or Rembrandt, or Turner, or many others. And yes, I have stood in front of paintings by each of those artists for long periods, trying to understand what the fuss is about. Am I a complete Philistine? Possibly, in the view of some.

I do find great beauty in minimalist art, but not in purely abstract art; merit in simple line drawings but none, apart from technical skill, in the intense detail of a Constable.

What's my point? ART is like beauty and love. It's in the eye of the beholder, with only our prior experiences and the expressed opinions and biases of others to impinge upon our outlook upon such things.

I don't necessarily agree that art can be separated from design. Art can, however, be separated from technical skills of execution... one need only look to the work of a forger or plagiarist, to see that distinction.

One of the businesses I own is a graphic design studio. We design corporate image concepts, logos, streetscape image and livery application standards and manuals. To this end I am constantly immersed in the business of refining and paring down design to its essentials; deriving the cleanest, purest image we can from the necessary elements included in the brief. Perhaps this is why I see beauty in minimalism, and I am less than enamoured of unnecessary or flamboyant embellishment?

In any case, the concept of art, as I can articulate it from my point of view, is likely to be different to the concept you or anyone else espouses. I think it is arrogant to assume that your definition of art should be applicable to others. Should your definition of the requisite technical skills? Absolutely, if that is what is required to comply with the basics of the artform. However, technical skills can be quantified and ennumerated, but "art" is more subjective than that.

One of the problems I have noticed, with the spread of bonsai to Western cultures, is that the intuitive aspects of the artform have been repeatedly subjected to attempts to quantify and describe in detail what makes a pot plant into a bonsai. The first major publication along these lines was the excellent book by Yuji Yoshimura. The book contains a lot of information that was interpreted as "rules" yet many of the colour plates in the book are of trees that definitely fly in the face of these "rules".

Westerners have long struggled with Eastern mysticism, mythology and religion, as it is largely counterintuitive to the rationalist approach which characterises Western culture and society. For that we can probably blame the doyens of The Enlightenment... Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Kirkegaard, et al.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we have to accept that Eastern art is different to what we were taught by slavish teachers with old textbooks and European ideas, and embrace the diversity of opinion that exists?


Getting back to the tree in the early stages of this thread: Removal of that portion of the jin appearing on the inside of the recurve on the right hand side of the tree might well simplify the design enough to make it look "right", within the confines of classical bonsai design? The shape of that curve appears a number of times in the design, so it may well be the element of the tree that needs to be highlighted, by the addition a little negative space at that point.

Just my point of view, mind you.

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